Ella Leroy dreams of escaping the dreary routine of her 1950s wife-and-mom life. Without telling her husband, she enlists her son Peter and his locally notorious girlfriend Patti in a scheme: to buy a run-down clamboat and reinvent it as an elegant cruising vessel for summer people in the beach town of Babbington, Long Island. But after Arcinella is purchased, Peter discovers that it is slowly sinking—and so each night he sneaks from his home to the harborfront, where he pumps the boat dry and so inflates his mother’s hopes a bit longer.
Eric Kraft grew up in Babylon, New York, on the South Shore of Long Island, where he was for a time co-owner and co-captain of a clam boat, which sank. He studied English at Harvard, where he invented the character Peter Leroy while dozing over a German lesson during his first year. The following year, he married his muse, Madeline Canning; they now have two sons.
After earning a Master's Degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Kraft taught school in the Boston area for a while, moonlighting as a rock music critic for the Boston Phoenix. After a series of positions in editing and publishing, Kraft and his wife founded Kraft & Kraft, an editorial-services company for educational publishers. Throughout the years, he wrote daily, trying to discover the stories that Peter Leroy had to tell.
Eric Kraft is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and was, briefly, chairman of PEN New England. He is also a recipient of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature.
Learn more at www.erickraft.com.
